


Sleeping Lessons

by annaslastdalliance



Category: Free!
Genre: (in a manner of speaking), Caretaking, Fear, Gen, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Role Reversal, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 15:05:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12510108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annaslastdalliance/pseuds/annaslastdalliance
Summary: The fact of the matter is that Nagisa goes over to Makoto’s sometimes, and not only when he’s run away from home and needs someplace to stay.(On a stormy summer night, Makoto gets an unexpected visitor and some unsolicited help looking after the twins.)





	Sleeping Lessons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gemini_in_tauro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemini_in_tauro/gifts).



> This fic was written for the Free! Rare Pair Gift Exchange, for the prompt: _Hazuki Nagisa/Tachibana Makoto - Maybe a domestic!au? I wanna see Nagisa looking after Ran and Ren._ It’s one of my first times writing to a prompt on a time limit, but I had a lot of fun with it! I hope you like it, gemini_in_tauro, and I apologise for all the ways I used this prompt as a jumping off point and deviated wildly, as well as the liberties I’ve taken getting into Makoto’s head, and my rather specific interpretation of him. I hope this is still your cup of tea~
> 
> Thanks to moeblobmegane for being my emergency beta, and both moeblobmegane and Princess_Andromeda for organising this gift exchange in the first place! Please note, I gave up on any semblance of verisimilitude halfway through this, so apologies for all factual errors and my mostly fabricated knowledge of the layout of the Tachibana house. Title is taken from The Shins’ excellent song, 'Sleeping Lessons'.

The fact of the matter is that Nagisa goes over to Makoto’s sometimes, and not only when he’s run away from home and needs someplace to stay.

In elementary school, it had felt like it happened practically every other day: Nagisa tagging along with Makoto after swim club under the pretext of borrowing one of Makoto’s swimsuits or last year’s class notes, and now that they’re both in high school, trying on the old pattern again feels a little like trying on an old, beloved t-shirt that has shrunk three sizes in the wash. It is familiar, and comfortable, and all the ways it doesn’t quite fit only make it feel softer against his skin.

In fairness, this is probably also down to Nagisa himself, and the particular, undefinable quality of his company. In high school as in elementary, there has always been something about spending time with Nagisa that feels  _easy_  for Makoto—easier than spending time with Rin, or Rei, or even Haru, for all that he enjoys it. It isn’t that Nagisa requires any less attention or care than the rest of his friends—and rather more in some respects—but rather that Nagisa’s needs are comparatively simple to deliver on. As a result, spending time with him often feels a lot like looking after Ran and Ren: just like the twins, the blonde wears his emotions on his sleeve, an open book before anyone’s even asked for its opening, and it makes him a bizarrely unsubtle houseguest for someone equally so capable of being conniving.

Or at least, so Makoto had  _thought_ , until the night he’d found Nagisa on his doorstep with a travelling bag tucked out of view of the doorway. This is not that time, of course, but it  _is_  the first time _since_ that time, and so it isn’t surprising that it weighs heavily in the air and on his mind when he opens the door to let Nagisa inside, and Nagisa blinks a few more times than strictly necessary before entering.

It’s a hot, sultry, late summer evening, and raining since dawn, so when Nagisa crosses the threshold, he brings the water from outside with him. It clings to his hair and his clothes, wets his fringe into a mass of heavy curls like a child’s drawing of the ocean. The overall effect makes Nagisa look younger than even his clothes and his demeanour, and although Makoto cannot put a finger on exactly  _why_  this is so unsettling, it still takes him moment longer than it should to fetch his guest a towel and offer him something to warm up with.

“Mmh,  _please_ ,” Nagisa says, gratefully, tying the proffered towel around his head the way Makoto’s seen Ran do after bath time. With the curls cleared from his face, Makoto can see the beads of water clinging to his skin, Nagisa’s smile wide and wet beneath them, like a kid in a public fountain. Then the smile falters slightly, and Nagisa sniffles and scrunches his wide eyes closed for a moment, fending off a sneeze. “Uhrg, I hope I haven’t caught a cold walking over from the station.”

“If you want to avoid it, make sure you dry your hair properly,” Makoto suggests, making his way over to the adjacent kitchen. “Did you lose your umbrella again? I’ll lend you mine before you leave tomorrow.” Over the sound of the water, he can hear Nagisa shedding his shoes in the entryway, two squelching thuds that force him to bite back the words  _shoe rack_ , narrowly. Despite all appearances, Nagisa is his friend, not his little brother, and Makoto is determined to tidy up after him as little as he can manage. With his parents away, and Ren and Ran already tucked into bed, this is the first night off babysitting Makoto’s had all week, and he’s determined to enjoy it like the normal eighteen-year-old that he is—whatever that means.

Which is why his face falls when Nagisa immediately rounds the corner to ask him about the twins.

“They’re already asleep,” Makoto explains as he pours out the water. “You can say hallo to them tomorrow morning.”

Nagisa pulls a face. “Aww, tomorrow morning? Are you sure they’re really asleep, Mako-chan? It’s only nine o’clock! I bet they’re not; I bet they just pretended to be asleep so that you’d go away, and then—”

“Not every child is as badly behaved as  _you_  were, Nagisa,” Makoto interrupts, picking the past tense with conscious effort, but he can’t really make himself sound stern about it; not when Nagisa is still bright-eyed and glistening and draped over the kitchen bar like some kind of wet puppy. “ _Tomorrow_ , OK? I promise. Anyway, here you are—I hope you don’t mind  _houjicha_?”

“No no,” Nagisa assures him, taking the mug with both hands. Under Makoto’s half-watchful gaze, he carries it back to the table, where he settles into one of the chairs cross-legged and leans over to inhale the steam, closing his eyelids. It isn’t until Makoto’s poured his own cup and come to sit opposite that he blinks them open again, smiling fulsomely. “Thanks for letting me come over, Mako-chan.”

“Of course,” Makoto says, frowning down at the woodgrain of the table. It’s unlike Nagisa to be either so sedate or so formal, and as much as he wishes it wouldn’t, the combination irresistibly conjures up another recent instance of finding Nagisa on his doorstep acting strangely, and the worry from earlier suddenly resurfaces, ugly. “It’s the weekend, and I wasn’t up to anything much. What about you, Nagisa?” There’s a beat as Makoto steels himself, watching Nagisa as he continues to drink with suspicious gingerness. “Where do your parents think you are right now, exactly?”

The tips of Nagisa’s ears go pink, and he sets down his cup with a laugh only half sheepish.

“Ahh, is it that obvious...?” There’s a silence as he drifts away, looking at Makoto like he’s hoping he’ll speak, but when he doesn’t, Nagisa finally capitulates by laying his head on the table with a moan of defeat.

“Rei-chan’s,” he mumbles, sideways, and if he doesn’t sound  _happy_  with the confession, exactly, there is nothing in his play-acted moroseness now that even comes close to the quality in his voice all those nights ago, when he’d breathed out  _please_ , palms on his knees, practically begging Haru and Makoto to take him in. “Since exams are coming up, Rei-chan is pretty much the only friend they want me to hang out with, because they know he’s always making me study.”

“And...?”

“And he  _is_  always making me study,” Nagisa completes, now bordering on sulky. He lifts his head suddenly again to appeal to Makoto at eye-level. “I need a break every once in a while, you know! I’m a human being, not a study robot like Rei-chan is!”

With difficulty, Makoto releases a breath long held in, trying not to telegraph his very palpable relief at the steadiness of Nagisa’s delivery, and its plaintive rather than frantic quality. Whatever this is, it might not be _good_ , exactly—but it isn’t serious, not in the way some other things have been.

 “So instead of going to Rei’s, you thought you’d come over here instead…?”

“Oh, no, I  _did_  go to Rei-chan’s.” Nagisa circles the rim of his mug with an idle finger, looking between it and Makoto sporadically. “My parents dropped me off there so I kind of had to, and anyway, I  _like_  spending time with Rei-chan—or at least, I like it _usually_. I had dinner at Rei-chan’s, and that was fun, and then I played games at Rei-chan’s, and  _that_  was fun, but then Rei-chan said it was time to study, and—”

“And you thought you’d come over here, instead,” Makoto repeats, and if there’s a trace of shame on Nagisa’s face as he nods, it is only a trace.

“I told Rei-chan I wasn’t feeling well and that I thought I’d better go home.” With absentminded curiosity, Nagisa slips his finger off the rim of his cup into the adjacent liquid before retracting it hastily. “I mean,” he continues, slightly muffled as he sticks the digit in his mouth to soothe it, “it was  _sort of_  true, actually; I  _was_  going to go home, and I really  _didn’t_  feel well…enough to study, anyway—but then I didn’t want to go home _right away_ , so I walked around by myself for a bit, and then it started raining, and so I thought I could come here, instead. I know  _you_  won’t make me study, will you, Mako-chan?”

There is no sensible way to answer that. “ _Honestly_ ,” Makoto says instead, and now that he has the full story, exasperation rushes in to smother any lingering remnants of anxiety. “ _Nagisa_. You can’t just—what if something happened, and your parents had to get hold of you, but they couldn’t find you at Rei’s?”

Panic shutters across Nagisa’s face in stages, saliva-damp finger sliding from his mouth as he clearly considers this possibility for the very first time.

“Nothing’s going to happen,” he says at length, slightly tentative, and the next sip of  _houjicha_  seems to steady him in this resolve because he continues earnestly: “And anyway, it’s only one night! And it really _was_ mostly true, you know—I  _am_  staying over at a friend’s, and I  _did_  go to  _someone_ ’s home, so—”

“Alright, alright,” Makoto exhales, spreading his palms to forestall some of Nagisa’s more creative excuses. “Enough already. I won’t tell on you, Nagisa, don’t worry. And of course you can stay here, whenever you need to. But you shouldn’t lie to your parents about it, and you shouldn’t lie to Rei for that matter either. He’s just trying to help you, you know.”

The lingering trace of shame re-emerges briefly on Nagisa’s face before it vanishes behind the tilt of his mug. “I know,” Nagisa says after a long, noisy second of swallowing, “and I’ll tell him the truth, tomorrow, honest! But…since I’m  _here_  now…”

“Mmm?” Makoto prompts cautiously, caught between wariness and indulgence, but something in his voice must give away which way he’s leaning, because Nagisa’s face suddenly splits anew into a retina-scorching grin. It’s only seeing it now that Makoto realises it’s been a long, tense few minutes without it.

“…wanna play video games?”

Makoto pretends to think about. “I guess we could do that,” he says eventually, and this time he’s quite unable to control his smile when Nagisa punches the air, almost knocking over his tea. “ _But_  we have to keep the volume down, OK? I don’t want to wake Ran and Ren.”

Nagisa just nods devotedly. “Got it. I bet we can be totally silent, even! Here—” He pushes his chair back from the table noisily to take off his slippers and brandish them at Makoto like a trophy. “We’ll be like ninjas! I know  _all_  the tricks. You’ve got to crouch down like a spider, fingertips on the floor. I saw it on  _Ninja Scroll._ Did you know that if you walk on the edges of stairs, instead of the middle, they’re less likely to creak?”

With the way the rain is picking up outside, they could probably tap-dance their way up the stairs and it wouldn’t really matter, but Makoto follows Nagisa’s lead anyway, and they tiptoe their way along the edges of the staircase together, two steadying fingers each against the railing. Up in Makoto’s bedroom, the noise is even worse, the cedar tree from outside pressed flush against the window and scraping its branches noisily against the pane. Makoto flicks on the light switch and wraps his arms around his shoulders, suddenly cold.

“So what did you want to play?”

“Mmmm.” Nagisa tilts his head, peering through the pleated line that is Makoto’s game collection, neatly tucked beneath his TV. “Ah—how about this one?”

Makoto leans down from his perch on the bed to take the disk Nagisa’s proffering. “ _Eternal Sonata_? Sure. I got it last year, but I haven’t played it yet, so I don’t know if it’s any good. Do you want to sit on the bed? I’ll put it in.”

As he crouches down to wrestle the console’s ducktaped disk container open, Nagisa hunts down the TV remote behind him, complete with a great deal of commentary on the contents of Makoto’s overstuffed wardrobe and the book he currently appears to be reading. Eventually, the screen flickers to life in the corner of Makoto’s eye: a sharp flash of white that remains imprinted on the back of his eyelids when he blinks them. Outside, the wind has begun making a low howl in counterpoint to the rain’s din, and the buzz of static coming from his speakers is comfortingly blanketing by comparison. Then there’s a dragging sound to overlay everything, and Makoto turns his head to find Nagisa shoving the coffee table aside with his feet, settled not on Makoto’s grey duvet as usual but the square rug just in front of it. After a moment, Makoto lifts one of the table’s corners to help him.

“You’ll hurt your neck like that,” he admonishes lightly, frowning down at the coil Nagisa’s made of his body on the floor of the bedroom. “And you shouldn’t sit so close to the TV.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Nagisa says, waving him off with a hand already welded to a controller, and as the PlayStation boots up, the blonde looks at him sideways, the sly glint in his eyes illuminated in the digital glow from the screen. “ _You_  should come sit down here with me, Mako-chan! It’s really comfy, and the bed makes a good backrest. And anyway, it’ll be easier to read the dialogue from here.”

This is a pretext if Makoto’s ever heard one—Nagisa notorious for skipping most cut scenes seconds in—but Makoto knows from long experience that this point isn’t really worth raising. Instead, he steps over the controller cord with practiced caution to settle back atop his duvet, about an arm’s length from the top of Nagisa’s head. He’s just noticing that said head is no longer sporting the towel previously wrapped around it, and wondering where it might’ve got to, when Nagisa suddenly says, for all the world as though continuing a conversation:

“So what about you, Mako-chan?”

“Huh?”

“ _Your_  parents,” Nagisa clarifies, which doesn’t clarify much of anything. “They’re not here tonight, are they?” He doesn’t turn his head, glued to the screen where he’s apparently trying to button mash his way past loading, but somehow Makoto can hear the malevolence in his smile all the same when he adds, innocently, “Does this mean you’re home alone with the twins?”

Even knowing Nagisa’s trying to push his buttons, Makoto still finds himself repressing both an eye-roll and a shiver. Outside, the cedar tree continues to beat at the window with marked insistence, the TV’s speakers too tinny to mask it properly, and Makoto curves his body away from it subconsciously, twisting to face Nagisa and the revolving purple crystal of  _Eternal Sonata_ ’s menu more fully.

“Mmh, it’s been just Ren and Ran and me all week. My grandmother’s having surgery on her hip, so my parents went to help get her place ready for when she comes home.”

As he says it, it suddenly occurs to Makoto that he’s mentioned this in front of Nagisa before, but he’s not surprised the blonde doesn’t remember: after all, they’d been eating at the time, sprawled out on the Iwatobi rooftop as is their lunchtime habit. Haru had offered to stay with him, though, and he thinks Nagisa might remember _that_ , since it’d been so nice and so unexpected, even if Makoto hadn’t considered saying yes for so much as a second. After all this time, Makoto likes to think he knows a polite offer when he sees one, and he and Haru are in each other’s pockets enough as it is—the last thing Makoto wants to do is give Haru even more reason to be tired of him.

“When are they coming back?”

Makoto’s eyes refocus to find Nagisa watching him consideringly, Polka losing health steadily and unnoticed on the screen behind him.  

“Sometime late tomorrow evening—so if I can just keep Ren and Ran _alive_ until then…”

He’s joking, of course, somehow unnerved by the sudden focus of Nagisa’s attention, but Nagisa meets his gaze with utmost seriousness.

“You can count on me, Mako-chan,” he says, gravely, and then immediately makes a noise like a rubber duck being stepped on as his head whips back around to face the TV and he realises Polka has died ignominiously while he wasn’t watching.

“As long as they’re not video game characters, at least,” Makoto agrees, biting back a smile again, and then jumps almost out of his skin as a crack of thunder slices through the game’s soothing music. Nervously, he leans sideways to lift the edge of his curtains and peer out into the blackness. Just in time for the last few hours of evening, the torrent of rain has turned undeniably stormy, and it makes Makoto want to wrap himself in his duvet and relocate to Nagisa’s side with a violence that is staggering. That, more than anything, is what forces him back to his feet.

“Speaking of, I’d better go check on the twins; make sure the rain hasn’t woken them.” There’s also the small matter of turning off all the lights they’d left on downstairs, and rinsing out their mugs, and making sure he’s locked the front door properly—in other words, the precautionary ritual Makoto’s settled into like a well-worn sofa ever since his parents left, but there’s no use boring Nagisa with the details, or even worse, running the risk of guilting him into helping. It’s mostly second nature, after all, and Makoto doesn’t mind doing it— _really_ , not even in this weather, when it means leaving the small oasis in his room of light and warmth and company. “Take the duvet from the bed if you get cold, alright?”   

Nagisa accedes without either turning his head or pausing, so Makoto balls up the duvet and leaves it on the rug just in case before he hops over the controller cord again and slips out into the corridor. Downstairs, he finds their two abandoned mugs as expected, and the towel he should’ve expected but hadn’t, discarded and dripping onto the wooden flooring. He rinses the cups out first and sets them on the dish rack, then checks the lock on the door and moves Nagisa’s shoes out of the walkway before he inevitably ends up in the dining room once again, staring at the discarded towel and the puddle of water forming beside it. Even then, he manages to make himself wait a good ten seconds before he picks it up, and it’s been a long enough week that he’s happy to call that a win.

“ _Onii-chan_?”

Makoto is so focussed on arranging the towel symmetrically on the rack that the voice makes him jump, even though he recognises its owner within a millisecond.

“Ren?” His younger brother is standing in the mouth of the bathroom, moving his fingers anxiously in front of him like a clumsy puppeteer. Lightning shutters briefly across the windows of the adjacent hallway, revealing Ran looking equally nervous behind him. “Ran? Why aren’t you in bed? Did the storm wake you up?”

“No,” Ren begins, hesitantly, and then continues hastily when his sister shoves an elbow into his side, “I mean, yes! The wind’s so loud, it woke us, and then we couldn’t get back to sleep.”

Makoto looks between them, skeptically.

“What is it, _really_?” he asks, and this time he directs the question at Ran, the most recent guilty party in their constant squabbling. “You’re not fighting with your brother again, are you?”

Both Ren and Ran look mortally offended by this suggestion, united in denial the way they aren’t in pretty much anything.

“No,” Ran says, her sleepiness warring with wounded resentment. “But we can’t sleep, not me  _or_  Ren. Can we stay up a little bit longer?”

“Well…” Makoto peers around them to the dining room clock, but it only confirms what he already suspected. The right answer, unmistakably, is  _no_ , but it’s a word he’s historically bad at employing, and the twins have long been proficient in exploiting this difficulty.

“ _Please_ , just another half hour…nine o’clock is so  _early_ …if mum and dad were here, we wouldn’t even be in  _bed_  until ten thirty…”

This is transparently untrue, and it has the opposite effect to the one Ren’s intending: the reminder of their parents, and their gentle but unyielding discipline, hardens Makoto’s resolve to be their equal. It was a kind of confidence they’d shown him, when they’d judged him capable of holding the fort by himself for a week, and it’s a confidence Makoto wants to measure up to with sometimes blindsiding ferocity.  

“Nice try,” this ferocity makes him say now, steering the twins back to the foot of the stairs with a hand on each shoulder. “But mum and dad would’ve put you to bed hours ago, and you know it. Come on. If the storm’s too loud, I’ll stay with you until—”

“I _told_ you that wouldn’t work,” Ran interrupts to snap at her twin, before Makoto can even finish his coaxing. “Why did you have to say that? _Moron_.”

“I’m _not_ a moron!” Ren defends immediately, his small face paling with horror as though this isn’t a charge he faces almost daily. “You can’t _call_ me that all the time—it’s not fair— _you_ ’re the moron—”

“Now now, you two,” Makoto breaks in, as firm as he can make it, and he drops down to a crouch between them, tugging them closer against him. “Don’t fight, you’re just tired.”

There’s a silence as Ran and Ren look at each other again, suddenly furtive instead of furious.

“I’m not tired, I’m hungry,” Ran says, after a beat, and she has barely finished speaking before Ren is chiming in as well, clumsy with eagerness:

“Me too! I’m hungry, too hungry to go to sleep…”

Makoto looks between them. “Alright,” he says, eventually, and straightens up with a sigh that he swallows with difficulty. The twins are obviously lying, but sometimes it’s easier to play along than fight it, and at least it’s not like any of them have school to worry about tomorrow morning. “So, what’ll it take for the two of you to go to back to bed? We have curry left over from dinner…or some _korokke_  from lunchtime yesterday…?” 

He’s shuffled over to the kitchen to peer in the fridge, but when there’s no answer to his question, he shuffles back to stick his head through the doorway instead of simply repeating it. The twins are still there, standing by the foot of the staircase in their pyjamas, but now they’re looking at each other in a way that suggests hitting might soon follow.

“Alright,” Makoto says again, this time mostly to himself, “wait here a second, OK? I’ll be back in a moment. And _be good to each other_.”

He takes the stairs two at a time, frustration percolating from his belly to his fingertips, and by the time he’s reached the floor of the landing, it’s transformed into a very real, lurking worry. It’s unlike the twins to act like this: stubborn and argumentative, of course, but rarely volatile and sensitive. Like most siblings, at the end of the day, Ren and Ran are really good friends in deep-cover as enemies, making the edge to their sniping tonight all the more puzzling. If this is a puzzle, however, it stands to reason there’s a piece he’s still missing, and luckily, Makoto thinks he knows just the person to help him find it.

When he opens the door to his bedroom, he finds Nagisa exactly where he left him: a coil of limbs with a controller in his lap and his tongue jammed between his teeth. The blonde doesn’t seem to hear the door creak, engrossed in what seems to be a decisive battle with some kind of half-reptilian, half-insectoid thing, and Makoto stays where he is for a moment, silently, just watching. Nagisa’s face is lit up in a square of light from the screen; his wide, light eyes made lighter by the glow of the TV. From this angle, the excitement on his face seem like a palpable thing, something Makoto could simply reach out and touch if the urge ever took him.

“Nagisa,” he calls from the doorway instead, and Nagisa’s head snaps around to look at him. “Sorry to ask you this, but could you keep an eye on the twins for a bit?”

Predictably, Nagisa springs to his feet, knocking the controller to the floor without even noticing. “Really?  _Can_  I?”

“Mhm, you’d really be helping me out. I’m just going to get them something quick to eat, but they’re so over-tired I’m worried that if I leave them alone, they’ll just start bickering...”

“Roger!” Nagisa says, snapping a hand to his forehead in a salute. “Hazuki Nagisa, Nobel Prize-winning peace-keeper and negotiator, is on the case!"

Makoto controls his snort with difficulty. “I’m counting on it. If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen.”

Sure enough, Makoto’s only just returned downstairs and tugged the fridge door open when he hears Nagisa’s voice floating back to him from the hall, followed by Ran’s delighted squeal.  

“Ren-chan, Ran-chan, hallo! You’re still awake? I told Mako-chan you would be!”

“Nagi-chan!” Ran’s initial delight cedes swiftly to petulance. “Huuuuh _,_   _nii-chan_ didn’t tell us you were here!”

From his spot in the kitchen, Makoto can’t hear the rest over the clatter of the microwave door, but after he’s kicked it off and fetched out two bowls, he leans out into the doorway again to look. His friend is standing at the foot of the stairs in front of the twins, a stiff hand held out to Ran’s forehead, and he draws it back to his sternum as Makoto watches.

“Wow!” Nagisa says, glancing down double-chinned at the right angle of his hand and body. “I don’t remember Ran-chan being this tall!”

Ran immediately ducks her head, blushing. “Oh, um…it’s because I had a growth spurt!”

“Tch.” Off to the side, Ren is looking transparently jealous of the attention. “We’re still the same height, you know.”

This makes Ran stamp her foot, any embarrassment suddenly forgotten. “What?! No we’re not! I’m taller. Mum measured me last week!”

“Don’t fight,” Makoto inputs mechanically from the doorway, but before he has the chance to make the contribution meaningful, the microwave sounds, forcing his retreat. By the time he’s pulled out the container, served out two reasonably equal portions, found the chopsticks, and called the twins over to eat, the conversation appears to have moved onto other things.

“Huuuuuh, so that’s what happened?” Nagisa is saying as the twins lead him into the dining room, Ran actually tugging him by the wrist.

“That’s right! But then it turns out the watch was actually invented by his own _grandfather_ all along. He just didn’t know it!”

“I see, I see. That _would_ be a big help, wouldn’t it?”

Makoto slides two pairs of chopsticks over the table, the gesture finally drawing Ren and Ran’s attention. “Alright, here you go. Is it hot enough?”

Apparently it is; or if it isn’t, the twins aren’t telling. Ultimately, this isn’t that surprising: Makoto suspected they weren’t even hungry to begin with, and their eating now confirms it, as they pick their way through the curry mechanically, clearly far more interested in sitting up and chatting. Usually, this might warrant some light scolding, or at least a remark about inconvenience and time wasting, but Makoto is just happy to see them calmer, and distracted enough to miss obvious opportunities to resume arguing. By the time they’re tilting their bowls to scrape up the last of the rice, there’s a sleepy cadence to their chatter, and Ren is leaning hard against his sister’s shoulder.

“Feeling better?” Makoto says, getting to his feet to clear the table, and Ren and Ran look at him like they’ve forgotten he’s there entirely. “Ready for bed now?”

“OK,” Ren says, mush-mouthed, and even Ran nods her own sleepy concession. As expected, Nagisa has managed to soothe them without even trying, and not for the first time, Makoto wonders when his friend—all light and colour and an aversion for boundaries—became so deceptively dependable. At times like these, Nagisa really _does_ remind him of Ran and Ren, despite everything—sometimes so childish he is accidentally inconsiderate, at others so giving he becomes wise without even realising. It makes a fondness well up in Makoto’s chest that he almost doesn’t know what to do with.

“Good boy,” he says at last, and reaches out to tousle Ren’s hair gently without looking at his friend. In general, Ren seems to need this kind of remark more than Ran does; and whether Nagisa ever needs it or not doesn’t even bear considering. “You two go brush your teeth again while I do the washing up, and then I’ll be in to say goodnight.”

They go as dutifully as soldiers, slippers quiet across wooden flooring, and Makoto gathers up the bowls and chopsticks and carries them to the kitchen after an apologetic smile in Nagisa’s direction. He’s only just deposited them in the sink and begun running the water to fill it when Nagisa surprises him by following, in the process of rolling up his sleeves.

“You don’t have to help me wash up,” Makoto says, and he means it, but he feels strangely touched and it must show in his voice because Nagisa just grins at him broadly.

“I don’t mind,” he says. “And…I’m kind of stuck on this boss battle, anyway, so I was hoping you would help me.”  

“Well, I can try, but I’ve never even played it, remember?”

“That doesn’t matter—it’s your game, so I’m sure you’ll be a natural! Anyway, if we _really_ can’t crack it, there’s still time to bring out the big guns!”

“…what’s that?”

“Haru-chan, of course!”

Makoto almost drops the dishtowel, and he definitely drops the set of chopsticks he was drying. “It’s almost ten o’clock, Nagisa. We’re not bothering Haru this late over a _video game_.”

“Huh? Why not? Haru-chan’s so good at video games…!”  

“So are you,” Makoto points out, and then continues, for once without really thinking, “and you know, you’re pretty good at _this_ , too, Nagisa,” and forgets to try to sound unsurprised by it.

Nagisa waves a soapy hand in his direction, dismissive but also faintly pleased. 

“Well, people tend to baby me all the time, so they don’t really notice.” His waving hand becomes a little more frantic as alarm crosses Makoto’s face automatically. “It’s fine, it’s fine, I quite like it, usually! But that doesn’t mean I can’t do things too, you know.”

“Mhm,” Makoto says. Beside him, Nagisa returns to washing, looking at him sidelong, almost shy, as he circles a bowl with a sponge. “I do know that. Do you wish more people did?”

“Sometimes I think it might be nice,” Nagisa says. He sticks his tongue in between his teeth for a moment to really consider it before continuing. “It’s kind of a nice feeling—being trusted like that, don’t you think?”

“Can be,” Makoto says noncommittally, because the alternative is saying  _yes_  far, far too quickly. While Haru is probably the most observant of his friends when it comes to measuring known quantities, Nagisa also has his moments, in fits and bursts of intuition, and Makoto really doesn’t want this feeling of his getting anywhere near Nagisa’s affinity for meddling. “Well, in any case, you’re doing a great job with Ran and Ren.”

Two surprising spots of colour appear on the upper ridges of Nagisa’s face. “Oh, well. Thanks.” He’s been holding the same bowl for the past five minutes, and only now seems to realise it, dunking it back into the soapy water to rinse. “It’s easy for me—they’re fun to play with.” The line of his mouth dips sideways, thoughtful. “I wonder if that’s what it was like for my sisters, playing with me, before they grew out of it?”

“Is that what happened?” Makoto asks, keeping his voice light quite deliberately. “They got too old to find it fun anymore?”

“Or maybe I did,” Nagisa says, pulling a face. “I dunno, to be honest. One day they were playing with me; the next it felt more like they were just being mean.” He hands a bowl to Makoto for drying with a forced shrug of his shoulders. “Well, anyway. I have Ran and Ren to play with now, and that’s  _way_  more fun than my boring sisters.”

There’s something in the way he says it that has Makoto saying, warningly, “It really  _is_  past their bedtime now, Nagisa…” but Nagisa just pops the plug from the drain and wipes his hands on his pants, smearing suds along the seams.

“I’m joking, I’m joking! Although…now that they’ve stayed up _this_ long, would a little bit longer really make all that much difference…?”

Nagisa’s probably just riling him, _probably_ , but Makoto is still reaching for an exasperated rebuttal when they round the corner to find Ren and Ran on the staircase, and the question becomes largely academic.

“I _thought_ I told you to go to bed,” Makoto says, as patiently as he can manage. The twins are sitting with the knees raised to their chests, arms wrapped around their ankles, clearly waiting. “Did you brush your teeth?”

“We brushed them,” Ren says.

“We just wanted to say goodnight to Nagi-chan!” Ran defends, and although Makoto immediately recognises this excuse for what it is, he doesn’t have the heart to call it out when it makes Nagisa bounce happily on his heels.

“Goodnight, Ren-chan, Ran-chan,” he says, scuttling forward to meet the twins on the steps. With them seated halfway up the staircase, and Nagisa standing at the base, he doesn’t have to bend for once in order to meet their gaze. “You should listen to your older brother though, and go to bed when he tells you to. I’ll still be here in the morning!”

“Alright,” Makoto interrupts, moving forward in turn before either Ran or Nagisa can draw the conversation out any longer. “You’ve said goodnight. Now time for bed.”

“Not yet!” Ren says, and he suddenly opens his grip, legs spilling out beneath him, to clutch onto Makoto’s arm so tightly Makoto thinks he might end up with bruising. “Just a little bit longer!”

“ _Please_ ,” Ran adds winningly beside him, slightly more composed than her brother, but with an edge about her voice still that makes the back of Makoto’s neck stiffen.

“Honestly,” Makoto says, and this time, when the frustration resurfaces, he doesn’t quite manage to bottle it. “ _The two of you_. What’s gotten into you? Why don’t you tell me what’s really bothering you?”

There’s a moment where Makoto doesn’t think they will, silently conferring the way they do when they can’t agree on a strategy—and then Ran tugs Ren’s sleeve until he releases Makoto’s wrist, and pulls his hand into her own to squeeze.

“It’s just…” Ran begins, eyes lowered, hesitating, “it’s just that it’s almost _Obon_.” She glances up to meet Makoto’s gaze, and Makoto feels a shiver run through him. Chattering in the kitchen with Nagisa to the backdrop of sloshing water and clinking ceramic, Makoto had almost forgotten the storm outside, but it seems louder now than ever as his brain retunes itself to noticing. “We  _were_  trying to sleep, honest, but then… _Ren_ said he saw something move outside the window.”

“Something move?” Makoto repeats, keeping his own voice a normal pitch with difficulty. In between school and swimming and everything else, _Obon_ has slipped his mind this year, but usually he is excruciatingly aware of its slow approach in the calendar. He likes the festival itself well-enough, but Nagisa has a habit of upping the ante of his pranks to coincide with the period, and even the less-malevolent of his schoolmates trade gossip for ghost stories when the veil is at its thinnest.

“Mm,” Ran confirms, nodding sharply. “I  _said_  it was just a firefly, but  _Ren_  said it was much too bright for that, and then—”

“Then?”

They exchange glances, nervously. “Then Ren opened the window, and there wasn’t anything outside it.”

Makoto releases a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “See?” he says, giving Ran a squeeze on the shoulder that he hopes is more comforting than obviously self-steadying. “It probably  _was_  just a firefly.”

“It _wasn’t_ ,” Ren disagrees, fervently, and takes a gulp of breath before continuing. “It was a—a _yuurei_ , I’m sure of it. They glow just like fireflies, sometimes. We told Nagi-chan and he showed us a picture on his phone.”

There’s a beat as Makoto makes sense of this, and then makes sense of Nagisa’s unusually prolonged silence over the last few minutes. The blonde has the grace to look at least a little bit sheepish when Makoto looks at him, a hand scrubbing awkwardly at the nape of his neck.

“I see,” Makoto says at last, turning back to face the twins. “So that’s it. And because of that, you don’t want to go to sleep?”

“We _want_ to,” Ran defends, suddenly close to tears, “but we’re just…we’re _scared_ , _nii-chan_.” She lets go of her brother’s hand and draws her polka-dotted pyjama legs back up to her chest. “What if…what if it really _was_ something? What if…something happens, and you can’t hear us over the storm?”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Makoto says, filling the words with every bit of conviction he can fit; even the bits he doesn’t seem have to give. “I promise. Ren…Ran…if you were scared, why wouldn’t you just tell me?”

Resting her chin in the valley of her knees, Ran doesn’t meet his eyes when she answers. “We thought you might be scared, too.”

For some reason, it’s not what Makoto’s expecting, and it ignites a small, sharp pain just beneath his ribcage. Of course Ran is right, and her prediction equally so, but it somehow hurts to hear all the same, especially when Makoto really _thought_ he’d done a better job of hiding it. He’s been jumping at every scrape of a tree branch, yes, and flinching at every cluster of lightning; and of course Ren and Ran know that making gentle fun of Makoto’s nervousness around _Obon_ is an established family ritual—but he really thought he’d managed to be braver, this year, or at least put on a better show of it. He’d _wanted_ to be brave enough, this time, that Ren and Ran would feel able to turn to him.

“I’m not scared,” he says at last, and if saying it can’t make it true for him, he hopes it can for the people listening. “There’s nothing to be scared of, Ran. They’re just silly stories.”

“ _Weeell_ ,” Nagisa’s voice inputs lightly from beside him, and without knowing exactly where Nagisa is going, Makoto knows it isn’t a place he wants to visit. “ _Well_ , I mean, _probably_ , but all stories have a grain of truth, you know.”

“Nagisa,” Makoto begins, warningly, but before he can continue, Nagisa has his phone in his hand, holding it out so that both Makoto and the twins can see the webpage loaded on it. There’s something pale and luminescent on the screen, something that makes Makoto grip onto Nagisa’s wrist, hard, and jerk it out of view for the twins.

“It’s OK,” Ren says, looking up from his knees, quickly. “That’s the picture Nagi-chan showed us earlier. The glowing—the glowing _yuurei_. It’s OK, we’ve already seen it.”

“Right,” Nagisa confirms, looking up at Makoto earnestly as he jiggles his hand in Makoto’s grip, and after a moment, Makoto forces his fingers open to release him. Ren and Ran are much braver than he is, clearly; so what right does Makoto have to try to protect them?

“ _But you know_ ,” Nagisa continues, tearing his gaze from Makoto’s back to the twins, “if all stories have a grain of truth, that also means they’re all mostly a lie, too. Right? After all, _that’s_ not realistic at all.” He pushes his screen back into the space between the four of them, and this time Makoto doesn’t do anything but stare down at it. As he does, he can feel the image imprint itself on his eyelids: a gaunt face beneath hair limp like spinach, skeletal limbs emerging from a kimono with red dripping from every billow. This time, when the sound of thunder rolls its way through the house’s walls, Makoto doesn’t jump or flinch. He feels frozen; rooted in place like a butterfly pinned.

“Why…why isn’t it realistic, Nagi-chan?” It’s Ran, still sounding teary but quickly rallying.

“Well, for starters, I heard that your hair and your nails continue to grow after you die, so shouldn’t her nails be long like claws and her hair down to her ankles?”

Surprisingly, Ran appears to consider it. “I…I guess so…”

“And there’s only _so_ much blood in a body, I mean.” Nagisa angles the screen back towards himself, frowning down at it like he’s genuinely thinking. “How come her sleeves are always so bloody? If she’s really been haunting Japan for a thousand, trillion years, shouldn’t they only be bloody at the very beginning?”

“That’s because they’re _magic_ ,” Ren says, but he doesn’t sound certain. “ _Yuurei_ aren’t really dead, and they’re not really alive, either. Maybe they don’t run out of blood the way living people do.”

“It’s possible,” Nagisa admits reluctantly, and he jams his phone back into his right pocket as he digs through his left in search of something. “That’s a good point, Ren-chan. After all, no one really knows how _yuurei_ work, do they? But I can think of someone who might. I wonder…Mako-chan, do you have a coin?”

Makoto nods, wordlessly. By now, his breathing is coming so tight and shallow it must be obvious even without him speaking, but neither Nagisa nor the twins is looking at him like anything is out of the ordinary, and some non-frozen part of Makoto takes over, fishing a hundred-yen coin from his pocket with perfect automaticity. Somehow, he remembers to hesitate before handing it over.

“What for?”

Nagisa’s extended hand twitches once, forebodingly. “ _Well_ …if the twins are  _really_  worried about some kind of spirit being around…I thought we could ask Kokkuri-san.”

Makoto doesn’t move immediately, but his fingers tighten around the coin in his grip.

“No,” he says, hoarsely, and Nagisa pouts and bounces on his heels, looking up at Makoto entreatingly.

“Aww, come  _on._  If we can just ask Kokkuri-san about it, I’m sure they’ll say it’s all nothing—”

“No, no _, no_ , not in a thousand, million years, Nagisa!” Makoto stuffs the coin back into his pocket with all the finesse of a child learning calligraphy, glances back at the twins who are now peering at him curiously, and then turns to speak to Nagisa exclusively. “That’s _enough_. We’re not—we’re _not_ debating whether _yuurei_ exist or not, and we’re definitely not _summoning_ one for a game of Twenty Questions about it. _Going to bed_ is the _only_ thing we are doing. It’s almost half past ten, and the twins should’ve been asleep hours ago. I know you’re trying to help, Nagisa, but talking about it more is just frightening them.”

It’s rare for him to speak like this, even with Nagisa—not that Nagisa is his sibling of course, let alone the target of Makoto’s caretaking, and who in any case responds better to light scolding than terse directives—but to Nagisa’s credit, he doesn’t seem taken aback by it, and he doesn’t even point out that the twins seem calmer now if anything. Instead, his eyes flicker past Makoto’s shoulders to Ran and Ren, still motionless on the staircase, and then back to Makoto’s face again, and he tilts his head as though gauging the difference between them.

“What about you, Mako-chan?”

“What do you mean, what about me?” Makoto asks, stiffly.

“Is it frightening you? Talking about it?”

A denial, at this point, would only be suspicious.

“The storm’s made everyone jumpy,” Makoto says instead, looking aside. “And now the twins are so tired they’re imagining things. We all just need to get some sleep, I think.”

For the barest of seconds, Makoto can see the gears turning in Nagisa’s head before something, whatever it is, clicks into place inside him.

“That’s a great idea, Mako-chan!” he is saying in the next moment, and he steps around Makoto, briskly, to climb the first step of the staircase and address the twins. “In that case, Ren-chan, Ran-chan—do you know where you keep the spare futons?”

Confused Makoto throws Nagisa a look that he hopes is more inquisitive than apprehensive, and Nagisa pretends not to notice. 

“In the _washitsu_ ,” Ran says. “We’ve got two.”  

“That’s perfect!” The blonde claps his hands together, making everyone that isn’t him jump. “OK then, here’s what we’ll do: Ren-chan, I want you to go get the futons and lay them out; Ran-chan, I need you to fetch the covers; and Mako-chan…Mako-chan and I will supervise, and/or keep a look out for spirits.”

“What are you doing?” Makoto asks, warily. He hasn’t heard of a method of summoning that involves futons and a _washitsu_ , but when it comes to Nagisa, he’s ready to believe anything.

“Isn’t it obvious, Mako-chan? We’re having a sleepover, of course!”

It’s so far from what he’s expecting that Makoto doesn’t react fast enough to stop it, the twins already bounding off in the direction of the _washitsu_ before he’s even opened his mouth to say anything. On consideration, perhaps he doesn’t need to. After all, it’s not the _worst_ idea Nagisa’s had all night—and it _does_ , ultimately, involve getting the twins to go to sleep—and since nobody has school tomorrow, it shouldn’t really _matter_ how much rest they get—and there are probably other reasons to let it happen, too; reasons that don’t involve the weird relief now anchoring his stomach, and the suspicious way it had coincided with Nagisa voicing his bizarre suggestion.

“Fine,” Makoto says, several beats too late for it to count as real permission, and he follows the twins in part to supervise the proceedings, but mostly to avoid the way Nagisa is looking at him.

In the Tachibana household, the _washitsu_ lies opposite the dining room, small and rarely used this season and consequently somewhat dusty. At New Year, when Makoto’s grandparents come visiting, this is where the _kotatsu_ gets set up, and where the seven of them sit down together to _osechi ryouri_ while Ren and Ran argue over who gets to watch which TV special. With the warmer weather, however, the TV has been unplugged and removed to his parents’ bedroom, and the _kotatsu_ packed away entirely, leaving the space bare enough to fit the two futons side-by-side with room for a walkway. As Makoto comes in, he finds Ren already crouched over one of them, clumsily unfolding it over the flooring while Ran rummages through the closet for a duvet. Makoto helps her select one and tug it into place over the mattress, before he lifts out the other futon himself and kneels down on the floor to unfurl it. After a moment, Nagisa wanders in from the hallway to help him.

It’s a comforting ritual, unpacking the futons and setting them up. When Makoto was younger, he used to volunteer to do it whenever his parents had guests; a way of getting to stay up longer amidst the light and the chatter downstairs. Even though it’s just the four of them, and Makoto is now the closest thing to the adult here, it still manages to feel a little bit like it did back then. In the dark, beneath the soft warm press of the silk, he imagines it will feel even more so. Then a peal of simmering thunder rolls its way through the room and Makoto stops imagining anything, a squashed, startled sound forcing its way through his windpipe. All the nostalgia of the moment suddenly sweeps out from under him, leaving him grasping after it like water through his fingers. After the unexpected lull, it feels all the more shocking: the back of his neck cold and prickling, his heart hammering hard enough that he briefly worries about dying in a way that doesn’t involve the metaphysical. He wishes he could say he doesn’t know why he’s acting like this, why he’s so frightened and jumpy, but he does, and it’s ridiculous.

In the end, it’s not just any one thing. It’s a lot of things: it’s the storm, and the hour, and the fact that it’s _Obon_ soon and the veil is at its thinnest, and that it’s just him and the twins and his old friend at home tonight, and he really  _ought_  to be the adult here. Maybe that’s the thing that frightens him most: the inescapable truth that if Teke Teke really  _were_  to drag herself through the window right this instant, Makoto would be the one expected to _do_ something about it—and that screaming uncontrollably probably wouldn’t cut it. Just the thought sends another shiver through him, and he shakes himself back to his senses to find Nagisa still kneeling in front of him, a small but unusually careful smile tilting the corner of his lips.

“Come on, Mako-chan,” Nagisa says, and there’s a strange confinement to his enthusiasm, as though he’s actually making an effort to regulate his volume for the first time since Makoto’s known him. He nods his head towards the twins, who’ve finished laying out the second futon and duvet while he apparently sat motionless doing nothing and are now poking through the closet at an old pile of DVDs, yawning prolifically. “At this rate, Ren-chan and Ran-chan are going to make it into bed before you.” 

There are a number of things to say to that, and they all rise up in Makoto’s throat simultaneously:  _Nagisa, you're not serious,_ and _you don’t have to sleep down here if you don’t want to,_ and _weren't you in the middle of playing PlayStation? Shouldn’t we go turn it off if you’re not going back to it?_ —but somehow, instead of any of these, all that comes out is, “I haven't brushed my teeth.”

And it’s  _absurd_ , and utterly embarrassing, but Nagisa only uncrosses his arms with something that might be relief and says, “Well, that’s easy to fix!” before bounding to his feet. He pauses to look over at the twins. “Ren-chan, Ran-chan, you have to promise me you won’t fall asleep before we come back, OK?”

Because of where he’s standing, he ends up saying it to Makoto as much as Ren and Ran, and Makoto feels himself blush unintentionally. It’s a good line, though; calculated in the way he knows Nagisa is more than capable: telling the twins he won’t be long, while also reminding them they’re supposed to be going to bed, while also not seeming to do any of those things. It’s the kind of line that Makoto might have used, in different circumstances; should’ve, maybe, if he hadn’t been so distracted listening to the old house strain under the storm and wondering if it could really take such a battering.

“We promise,” Ren and Ran chorus behind him, sounding only slightly guilty, and Makoto twitches back to the present moment to find Nagisa looking at him pointedly. Their eyes meet for a second before Nagisa turns on his heel and trails back upstairs like he just expects Makoto to follow him, and Makoto delivers.

They brush their teeth together in the shared upstairs bathroom, after a brief interlude digging out a spare toothbrush for Nagisa, who has, as usual, forgotten to bring his own. Makoto, for his part, spends the first minute trying to avoid Nagisa’s eyes in the bathroom mirror, and the next two trying not to notice how much his heartrate has slowed in the past three minutes, and how much steadier he feels for no good reason. Outside, the storm continues wailing and beating angrily at the windows, but Makoto only jumps once, and the instinctive fear evaporates immediately at the perfectly ordinary sound of Nagisa spitting and rinsing. When he straightens up from doing the same, he finds Nagisa watching him again, considering. There has been, in retrospect, an _awful_ lot of watching.

“Hmmm, what’s next? Oh—pyjamas!”

For one horrifying, heart-stopping second, Makoto thinks Nagisa will keep to his habit of overstepping lines in the sand without even noticing, but then Nagisa just tilts his head to the side like a bird and continues, blithely, “So…uh, I might’ve forgotten my pyjamas, too…can I borrow some, Mako-chan?”

While Nagisa changes, Makoto trails back to his bedroom to turn off both the television and the PlayStation, which Nagisa had indeed left running, and change into pyjamas himself: a soft green set with striped lapels and ivory buttons. As he folds his clothes and sets them on the edge of the dresser, his reflection catches his eye in the mirror, and he turns to face it with apprehension. It’s not as bad as he fears. He still looks scared, of course—still wide-eyed and pale with a tinge of about-to-be-sick that he’d once seen on Nitori before a competition—but his breathing is no longer jagged, and his heart has returned from pounding to beating. If there is one last moment he can stop this, it is probably now, before Ren and Ran have settled down enough for sleep and while he himself is still feeling steady enough for it. But if it feels a little strange—to have Nagisa, of  _all_  people,  _babying_  him—he knows it’s not really  _for_  him so much as it is for his younger brother and sister, and Makoto is nothing if not an attentive older sibling.

Back downstairs, the house is still and dark save for occasional flashes of lightning, and the _washitsu_ is a warm bubble of light at the end of the creaking staircase, waiting for him. He slips inside its walls to find Nagisa already inside, perched on one of the futons in a pair of his old pyjamas and teaching the twins how to make the shape of a dragon with their fingers. Makoto closes the door behind him and flicks the light switch to a predictable amount of disappointed groaning, and then pads over to the nearest futon and slips under the fold of the duvet. He can feel the twins getting comfortable beside him, pointed toes grazing at his shin, and he’s only just found a comfortable angle for his neck on the pillow when a small voice pipes up next to him.

“Nagi-chan, you forgot goodnight kisses!”

“Ahh, sorry, sorry!” Beside him, Nagisa sits up at the waist, a curly-headed shape in the darkness. He sticks an arm out over Makoto’s body for leverage, and then leans over him to plant two deliberately sloppy-sounding kisses on Ren and Ran’s foreheads. “Goodnight Ren-chan, goodnight Ran-chan,” he singsongs over Ren and Ran’s mutual noises of disgust, scrubbing at their skin as he pulls back, and Makoto has just the time to feel his mouth curving into a smile before Nagisa is ducking over him as well, lips dry against Makoto’s temple. “Goodnight, Mako-chan,” Nagisa completes, muffled by fabric, and by the time Makoto’s unfrozen enough to look sideways, the other boy has sunk completely beneath the duvet, only visible as a tuft of blonde curls above it, like foam on the surface of the ocean. Makoto looks at him for a while without really thinking of much of anything, listening to the slowing breathing of the twins behind him, and he doesn’t know how much time passes before the question finds its way past his lips.

“Is there  _anything_  you’re afraid of?”

He probably means it to sound exasperated, but in the darkness it emerges faintly sincere, from softness and maybe something else that Makoto can’t quite put a name to.

“Oh,  _hundreds_  of things,” Nagisa admits, equally softly, and he rolls carefully to face Makoto before continuing. At this angle, his face is sharp and faintly luminescent in the slatted moonlight, his voice soft and warm to equal both the blankets and the darkness, and it’s easy to imagine he’s never been scared in his entire life. “But I don’t think  _you’d_  find them very scary, Mako-chan. That’s what makes us such a good team.”

_A team_ , Makoto thinks, _is that what we are?_ , and perhaps it’s stupid, but he’s never thought of it like that before. Of course, Nagisa and Makoto are part of the same  _swim_  team. Of course, Nagisa and Makoto are friends outside of that, as well. But he’s never thought of Nagisa as a teammate when they  _weren’t_  swimming—or Rei or Rin or even Haru, for that matter. Being in a team with someone means being able to rely on them, and Makoto likes to think of himself as someone who values his friends too much to impose on them. But perhaps he has been, anyway; perhaps it’s unavoidable, with friends like these. He stares at Nagisa through the dimness, a suspicion taking shape out of the dust in front of him.

“You forgot your toothbrush…and your pyjamas…you weren’t spending the night at Rei’s at all, were you?”

“Well, I  _was_  at his house earlier,” Nagisa says, innocently, but he doesn’t follow it up with anything, and Makoto doesn’t have to be a genius to interpret the meaning of silence from someone who otherwise never stops talking.

“You thought something like this might happen.”

“Rei-chan thought,” Nagisa corrects, and the smile is audible in his words. “I agreed.”

There’s a moment’s silence then as Makoto considers this, and when he opens his eyes again, he can’t remember having closed them.  

“Thanks,” he breathes, softly enough that it won’t wake Nagisa on the off chance he’s fallen asleep, and his only answer is whistling breathing, and the soft, wet sound of a tongue repositioning itself behind teeth. After a moment, Makoto rolls on his other side to watch the twins, the rise and fall of the covers in time with their breathing, and thoughts of Teke Teke and Kokkuri-san recede like a tide pulling out from the beach. He watches until they fade completely, forgotten like a bad dream, and a second wave of sleep washes over him, dragging him down like a chest thrown to the deep.

**Author's Note:**

> moeblobmegane reminded me I use a ton of Japanese words in this and that it might be nice to give a (rough!) definition of them, so here we go:
> 
> \- _houjicha_ – a low caffeine Japanese green tea  
>  \- _korokke_ – a deep-fried dish similar to French croquettes  
>  \- _nii-chan_ – probably more obvious, meaning ‘brother’  
>  \- _Obon_ – a Japanese festival in honour of the spirits of one’s ancestors, and generally a spooky moment in the calendar  
>  \- _yuurei_ – ghosts in Japanese folklore  
>  \- _Kokkuri-san_ – a Japanese game similar to Ouija board or table-turning  
>  \- _washitsu_ – a Japanese-style multi-purpose room, often with tatami flooring  
>  \- _kotatsu_ – a blanket-covered table with a heat source underneath  
>  \- _osechi ryouri_ – dishes traditionally eaten at Japanese New Year  
>  \- _Teke Teke_ – a Japanese urban legend about the ghost of a young woman who fell on a railway line and was cut in half by the oncoming train
> 
> Also, I haven’t actually seen _Ninja Scroll_ , played _Eternal Sonata_ , or watched the _Yo-kai Watch_ movie, so please forgive me if any of these references are wildly inaccurate. Also also, hair and nails (sadly) do not continue to grow after you die, but Nagisa’s an idiot with a flexible relationship to the truth in any case. 
> 
> Finally, I wrote a huge paragraph on my working copy of this about my characterisation choices, but this note is getting long enough as it is, so let me just put the TL;DR: version: Makoto needs to stop overcompensating, Nagisa’s a perceptive handful as usual, and nothing’s as scary as it first seems when you’ve got company. Also, Makoto is neither as piteous nor as burdensome as his internal monologue wants to think. Feel free to HMU on my tumblr if you want the outrageously long-winded version, and in the meanwhile, thanks for reading, gemini_in_tauro most of all~


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